Economics, properly understood, makes sense out the complex web of historical relations that constitute reality, namely by utilizing economic theory. Economics without price theory is not economic theory, and measurement without theory isn't empirically meaningful. However, graduate students are...

Knowledge has its counterpart in action, and your actions emerge from your normative calls in personal policy-making. On those two steps I propose to bring to the traditional Hayekian knowledge problem a prism of Smithian moral analysis. This approach perhaps sheds new light on the absurdities...

This document includes the Introduction and table of contents of a project: Think Spiral: Essays on Adam Smith. The Introduction has the following sections: (1) A Social Grammar(2) The Three Justices: Commutative, Distributive, and Estimative(3) The Liberal Program(4) The Theory of Moral...

Henry Hazlitt was a unique public intellectual, who strove to not only to enlighten the general public with his writings, speeches, and appearances on TV and radio, but sought to contribute to the specialized disciplines of economics and philosophy. The evidence supporting my conjecture that...

The Fall 2010 issue of the Journal of Private Enterprise featured a complicated set of papers (link to the issue). The lead article was a long paper by Jason Briggeman and me, on Israel Kirzner’s work on coordination and discovery. The thrust of our paper was an affirmation of Kirzner’s...

James M. Buchanan has argued that the primary role that the economist plays in society is a pedagogical one. The job of the economists is to teach students the principles of economics, most notably an understanding of spontaneous order and the role of the price system in generating that order...

Henry Hazlitt was a public intellectual who had unusual strength in both economic reasoning and articulation and played a central role in communicating the ideas of classical or ‘orthodox’ economics to the general public. He occupied a unique position in the mid-20th century intellectual...

This is the first paper to test the asset pricing implication of leverage in a laboratory. We show that as theory predicts, leverage increases asset prices: when an asset can be used as collateral (i.e., when the asset can be bought on margin), its price goes up. This increase is significant,...